It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. The last couple of months have been shaded by stress—dissertation and other various deadlines have been hanging over me like the damp gray clouds that often fill the sky in late fall in Castile. I haven’t been as attentive to things good and beautiful as I would have liked. I’ve felt disjointed—as if my intellectual and mental preoccupations had split me in two: a floating head and a neglected body. Ugh. I hate that feeling, when the realms of lucidity seem so far away from earth.
Happily, the clouds started lifting a couple weeks ago. I just got back from a second trip to Salamanca, where rain early in the week gave way to purified blue skies and sunlight that seems warm on the gold stone of the buildings even in mid-November.
And I got to read and listen to poems.
Poetry is my antidote to floating-head syndrome. This may seem counter-intuitive. But for me, poetry’s attention to language as a physical thing (words on a page or, even better, sounds spoken by someone’s mouth and reverberating in my ears, or spoken by my mouth), is centering. I find myself, my whole, unified, flesh-and-bone-and-thinking-being self, when concentrating on-experiencing?-a poem.
So, last week in Salamanca I read manuscripts of poems, and I went to a presentation of a new book by a poet I know there. I had read part of his book already, but really enjoyed hearing him read his work aloud.
The main thing about this particular poet –I think he would agree with me-is that he is a Christian, and a Protestant at that. (Protestant poets, as you might imagine, are rather scarce in Spain.) He’s very vocal about his faith, and his poetry is filled with Christian imagery and direct reference to, well—Jesus. Such directness is a bit unsettling for modern-day intellectuals and artists, whether they are believers or not, who tend to have an allergy for such bluntness, or effusiveness. (I confess, I have often shied away from his poems, thinking them prolix.)
But when read out loud, and with this man’s undeniable passion, the effect is noticeably different. He spoke his meandering, run-on sentences with a genuineness that is often hard to find in people, poets included. As he read poems about his parents, his home, his wife, his God, his voice rang out clearly, his hand gesticulated in the air. I came away from the reading with a greater admiration for him—for him as an artist, but even more, I think, for him as a whole person. And, I came away amused by a secular commentator’s efforts to fit this poet into the bounds of literary-world propriety when he referred to “a subtle reference to the sacred” in the book. There was nothing “subtle” about the religious element in the book!
In terms of taste, I do still prefer the less overt approach to faith in art, I think. I’ve just been re-reading some poems by Ledo Ivo (not, as far as I know, a religious poet)—“Uma busca incesante” [“The Unceasing Search”] and “A neve e o amor” [“Snow and Love”]—that resonate profoundly with my own faith. (Maybe more on this later.) These poems speak to me directly from the page, and they make me want to read them aloud myself. In any case, that centering force of the spoken word in poetry has been a wonderful thing for me this week.
Add to the spoken word the sung word, and I am feeling like a whole, integrated person again. I stayed after church this morning to prepare advent songs with a small choir. We sang “Fruto del amor divino” aka "Divinum Mysterium.” Amen and amen.
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